


Rise Above

by scarletrobin



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Backstory, Childhood, F/M, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-03-26 01:19:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3831853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarletrobin/pseuds/scarletrobin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My name is Felicity Smoak and I am 26 years old. I’m educated, employed, and successful. I have traveled, I have seen some of the world, and I’ve fulfilled a few of my life goals. I have had boyfriends, I’ve had sex, I’ve had my heart broken and my morals challenged.</p><p>And I have never been in love.</p><p>Come meet the men in Felicity’s life that have made her into the person she is today.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Felicity’s Childhood

**Author's Note:**

> Quick author's note (I generally avoid these): Consider this as starting before Season 1. Show canon will eventually be integrated. 
> 
> This is my first original story in the Arrow universe, and my first story in 2+ years. I might be a little rusty. Reviews = Love.

"It ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough  
A man meets woman and they fall in love  
But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough  
And you’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above”  
\- Tunnel of Love, Bruce Springsteen

My name is Felicity Smoak and I am 26 years old. I’m educated, employed, and successful. I have traveled, I have seen some of the world, and I’ve fulfilled a few of my life goals. I have had boyfriends, I’ve had sex, I’ve had my heart broken and my morals challenged.

And I have never been in love.

But alas, I am getting ahead of myself. To have a true appreciation for my story, my whole story, you have to go back to the beginning. And yes, by the beginning I mean my childhood, which may be boring for some but it is integral to the woman I have become today. After all, isn’t that how we define ourselves, as the sum total of our experiences? The good and the bad, all thrown together in a blender?

I was born in Las Vegas. It’s not a horrible place to have grown up yet I didn’t know what I’d been missing, what misconceptions I had about other cities and countries in the world, until I started to travel. Then again, when you’re only five your perspective on life is a little different. I remember driving on the expressways into the city and thinking we were going to Los Angeles. That’s how off my perception was of a real city, or how long it took to get anywhere. How in the eyes of a child the world is much smaller than it is in reality. Or is it that the world is much bigger?

My father left when I was seven. I don’t remember what he did for a living, I just know that he worked and it was enough to bring home a good paycheck for our family. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, before he left us, and she worked as an artist on the side. One thing I learned very early on in life was my dad was the parent. My mother, most certainly, was not. She never wanted kids, my father had to beg and plead and cajole her into it, and she made sure she reminded me of that simple fact every day when I got out of bed. 

Which made our lives that much harder when he left. My mother, suddenly thrown into a life she never wanted, with a kid and no job and no man. Not many artists make it in this world, so she had to fall back on her assets, namely her looks and her body. Thus the cocktail waitress in tight dresses and high-heels was born.

My mother always told me that I was an ugly baby that got better with age. I didn’t have any hair until I was about two but then it finally grew in and was a “dirty blonde”, in her words. I hated that term because it always made me feel, well, dirty. My hair darkened and by the time I was six or seven it was a dull brown color, monotone and boring. She never liked long hair so I walked around for many years with one of those horrid “bowl” haircuts. You know the ones, where you would swear a Tupperware bowl was placed on your head and they simply trimmed your hair along the edge. I guarantee you that in some of my childhood pictures you cannot tell if I am a boy or a girl. 

My eyes on the other hand seemed to do the opposite of my hair. They started out a deep dark gray but lightened with age. I liken it to a storm clearing, going from the darkest clouds on the horizon to the color of the sky after the tempest has passed.

My skin was so fair there were times I swore I was a partial albino. I know that’s not possible, or at least I learned it was not possible as I learned more about genetics and pigmentation, but it really was the easiest way to describe my complexion. I was one of those children who would burn as soon as I stepped out into the sun. Having a tan was completely foreign to me. There were only two shades my skin would I turn: pale, or lobster.

From as early as I could remember I was the odd child at my school. I was the one who could read at the tender age of three; who started Kindergarten at four; who was still so bored they moved me up to first grade halfway through the year making me two to three years younger than the rest of my classmates. I was the only one who did not attend religious classes every Wednesday after school with everyone else because I was Jewish. As I got older I always pondered this oddity…how a public school district could have a separate building on the campus that was owned by the local Catholic Church, and how children were allowed to be dismissed early for their religious education.

Didn’t this violate the separation of church and state?

I was well known for being the only one to actively question the presence of faith. Everyone else questioned my lack thereof.

Third grade was when I got my first computer, and I started coding HTML a few weeks later. It didn’t take long until the teachers were coming to me to learn the basic skills needed for their classrooms. Yes, a true teacher’s pet.

In fourth grade I remember coming out of the girl’s bathroom with the bottom of my skirt stuck into the top of my underpants, and everyone laughed and snickered for an hour rather than telling me about it. I don’t know what humiliated me more, everyone seeing my underwear with little pink flowers all over it, or overhearing the lecture the teacher gave the other students about not putting down poor, shy Felicity. 

I don’t remember much about fifth grade except for the reading teacher who insisted upon snapping the backs of the girl’s training bras. If that happened today he’d be arrested so fast his head would spin, but this was before social media and things like that were, for the most part, still kept quiet. Just like our favorite teacher turned principal who later died of AIDS. No one would ever speak of that incident because of the stigma associated with AIDS. Thank goodness people are more accepting now than they were then.

I was then on to middle school and sixth grade, when despite my young age I was one of the first girls to start my period in front of the whole school. Talk about a horrid embarrassment. 

I would really like to forget seventh grade when I discovered makeup but not how to properly apply it without looking like a two-bit whore. Oh, and then the incident from the Christmas concert…how could I forget about that? I was in chorus that year as part of my music education requirement, and the day before the concert we had a mandatory after school practice. When finished with the rehearsal I was sitting out in front of the school, wondering how the heck I was supposed to get home. The practice was so late that there were no busses running to take students home, but that wasn’t a problem for my classmates. They had parents who were willing to pick them up. But not my mother, oh no. She always felt that she couldn’t be bothered with school activities. She didn’t want me participating in them, didn’t want to have to drive me back and forth, she wouldn’t ever attend anything and she discouraged me at every turn from participating. It was truly isolating for me, socially. In this specific case, she didn’t believe that the practice was mandatory. She said if it was truly required the school would have provided transportation for us. Luckily one of my teachers drove me home; otherwise I would have walked the two miles home in the cold weather. 

By eighth grade I was starting to get taller and as a result clumsier, and that’s when boys discovered how much fun it was to trip me. Constantly. Whether on flat surfaces or on stairs. I can’t tell you the number of times a bag was “accidentally” placed in front of me as I was descending the stairs, and the number of times I would fall down two or three steps. I’m still amazed that the most I did was break a few fingers, I figured with my luck I would have died from a subdural hematoma or something equally unpleasant.

High School was just as painful. Aren’t those years painful for everyone? It never is all sunshine and roses like they make it out to be in the books and the movies. It is hormonal, it is emotional, it is one confusing jumble of things that you can’t understand and it makes you so frustrated that you just cry yourself to sleep at night wanting nothing more than to understand WHY you feel the way that you do. 

Throughout my first two years I was as much of a social outcast as ever. My two closest friends were Spike and Esme, my two Guinea Pigs. Spike named because of his spiky orange and white fur; Esme after a J.D. Salinger story, For Esme with Love and Squalor. I remember reading the story in English class, and I couldn’t remember the plot or the characters but I remembered the title. It was a name I always loved.

I was an excellent student, at the top of the class, despite being younger than everyone else. I had a natural aptitude for the sciences but I was always reading; constantly in the library, taking books out, spending my study halls devouring anything I could get my hands on instead of doing class work. Ironically enough, I hated English. When I would read books, I would read them for the stories. I would read to get lost in another life, to experience things that were foreign to me, to see things that I couldn’t readily see. I didn’t read to make analogies to real life, or to see parallels between stories and historical events, or to understand the supposed beauty of iambic pentameter. The analysis of stories, the dissecting and sectioning of something enjoyable into something painful and unromantic, completely killed the study of the English language for me. I still read as much as I could, but if it was something assigned for class I’d go out of my way NOT to read it. I didn’t want to destroy a story I might otherwise enjoy.

My bumbling awkwardness followed me into high school as well, resulting in multiple accidents and visits to the nurse’s office. Two weeks into my Junior year was probably the single most humiliating injury I ever experienced. I decided to wear a skirt one morning simply trying to impress some boy. Like wearing a skirt was really going to accomplish that task for this homely, bumbling girl. In any case, as I was getting off the school bus, I twisted my ankle on the middle step and literally fell out of the bus, smacking right onto the blacktop of the parking lot. As expected, everyone stood around laughing and pointing and not a single person moved to help me stand back up. I managed to right myself, get brushed off, and limp inside to my locker. About five minutes later I was still standing there, trying to figure out what to do with my nylons that were now shredded while cursing my mother for making me feel about fifty years old for forcing me to wear them to school in the first place. I felt a tap on my shoulder and quickly spun around to see vice principal standing there. He mentioned that the bus driver had called into the office to tell them about my little incident, and he wanted to know if I was okay. 

Now, I liked Mr. Hamlin. I really did. But I also hated to admit to weakness, or needing help, so I did what I always did. I shrugged off my injury, and told him I was fine. Of course, my body had to betray me for as soon as I turned to walk away my leg collapsed under me. He caught me before I could fall completely to the ground, picking me up in his arms and carrying me to the nurse’s office. I didn’t think there was anything that could have made me more humiliated than that. Seriously, what girl wouldn’t wish for the star quarterback to be whisking her away to safety, rather than an aging school official?

If I thought that was embarrassing, I hadn’t seen anything yet. When my mother showed up later, in her cocktail waitress dress and 6-inch heels, to take me to the hospital that entire wing of the school got to listen to her rant about “what were you thinking, wearing a skirt in the hopes that some boy might actually look at you” as well as the “this totally ruins my morning, I’m going to lose hundreds in tips because of you”.

Wonder where I got my loathsome self-esteem from? Now you know.

I was on crutches for a good three months from that incident. My ankle hadn’t been broken, but I had severely sprained it. They said that I would have been better off breaking it because it would have healed faster. I honestly think I spent as much time on crutches as I did walking normally throughout my four years in the school.

After that accident I was allowed a modified gym program. I guess the school was worried about how much I seemed to hurt myself and thought I was becoming a lawsuit liability. The cool thing was I basically got the equivalent of a personal trainer. Any time the class was doing something like volleyball (where I always broke my fingers) or basketball (where I would always wind up with a concussion), they would let me work out in the weight and cardio room for the class period. For things like swimming and archery and golf, I’d participate right along with the regular class. I think it worked out well for everyone. I may have been homely looking, but I wound up with a damn nice body.

The summer between my junior and senior year was the first time I started to have a little bit of fun. I was working part-time for an electronics repair shoe and I took driver’s education for three hours a day for five weeks. One of the boys in my group, Matt, was new to the school. He started talking to me and actually befriended me, much to my shock.

When school started for my Senior year I figured he’d ignore me, deny having met me over the summer. He was new to the school, after all, so he could easily pick and choose his friends. Why would he want to keep talking with me? Much to my surprise, during lunch on the first day he found me sitting in the hallway. I was eating lunch by myself, just as I had always done in my previous years at the school. He literally pulled me to my feet, dragging me as I was tripping and stumbling, just so I could meet his twin brother Mark and their best friend David. I knew of David from previous classes, not because we had ever spoken but just from his presence. The twins had moved into the house next door to him right as summer had started, and that’s how their friendship started. Apparently I was the last missing link, for that short three minutes of my life was how our little group came to be. We were stuck like glue for the rest of the school year.

Our teachers jokingly called us “The Law Firm”. Schultz, Schultz, Fender, Smoak and Associates. Because the four of us were always together. We were on several different committees as co-presidents, in all the honor societies, and we participated in the academic decathlon as a team. We were always planning and scheming and getting into things. Well, as much trouble as four straight-laced students could get into, which wasn’t very much, although we did have our moments. As four of the top ten students in our class, we probably got away with more than most of our peers. 

For example, there was one day when we had mandatory drug and alcohol education. It was supposed to last all day with lectures, seminars, role-playing sessions and the like. For us, this would have been complete torture. We simply were not the type of kids who were going to throw away our futures on stuff like that, and having to listen to someone lecture us all day would have been pure torture. So all four of us forged notes from our parents claiming that we were going on college visitations. Never mind the fact that we all had applied for early admissions to colleges, but the office secretary wasn’t going to know that. We got our exemption from the day, and promptly drove to Lake Mead and spent the day hanging out on the water.

Then there was the Friday before Spring Break. We were all in school, bored out of our minds, when someone decided that we needed to go to our favorite Chinese restaurant for lunch. Which doesn’t sound like that big deal, but our school was considered a closed campus meaning students were not allowed to leave until the end of the school day without the risk of suspension. This didn’t scare us very much, being so close to the end of our Senior year. So we snuck out, ate, and made it back about ten minutes after the afternoon attendance. Our physics teacher glanced at us with a smirk when we came strolling into the classroom and said he’d look the other way if we gave him our leftovers. Which we did, and we got away with it.

I went to prom with one of the twins. Not Matt, the one with whom I had taken Driver’s Ed, but Mark. The other brother. Mark and I had dated casually throughout the year, coupling up whenever we went out with people but never going out with just the two of us. He had a childhood sweetheart who lived in Ohio and he still held her in his heart. I knew I could never compare to her, but I tried. Boy did I try, looking like a complete fool sometimes, but isn’t that what fledgling relationships are supposed to be like? 

My mother never had issue with my hanging out with three boys. She didn’t see any harm in it. David wasn’t a threat since he didn’t like girls (if you catch my drift), and the twins were very devout in their religious convictions. So much so that I never even got a peck on the cheek from them. Our friendship was as platonic as it could possibly get and there were times that they really did treat me like one of the guys. I remember one day after school, in the springtime, hiking with them in one of the local parks. I have no idea how we got on the topic, but they started talking about being a righty or a lefty. Mark commented on being a lefty, and I looked at him and said “no you’re not!” That was the day I learned that guys generally have to…erm…adjust themselves to one side or the other to prevent sticking out. And apparently he preferred the left.

I’m a girl. That type of problem never even crossed my mind! Either that or they were truly pulling my leg. I’ve never had the courage to ask another man about that little “issue”.

They always teased me for being little-miss-prim-and-proper. The one who was skittish about anything and everything sexual. The one who wouldn’t make so much as a whisper of an errant bodily function in the presence of others. The one who scored highest on the purity test we took senior night, the week before graduation, just for fun. Because after all, I was the geek girl who had never been kissed. I was the one that believed in the Hollywood projection of love, the type of love a girl dreams about, from her first kiss on the playground to the prospect of her first lover as a teen. It was something I dreamed about yet something completely foreign, something that I had yet to experience and something that never seemed to come my way.

We spent most of our free time in the summer after graduation together. As the end of the summer grew near our moods grew more melancholy. I remember saying to them at one point “Don’t you wish we could live like this for a little longer? Just living off our parents, having no worries, just being with friends?” They agreed wholeheartedly, yet agreed that it wasn’t realistic. Great things were expected of us, from both our families and our community. We needed to grow up, we needed to move on and learn and morph into independent beings.

Matt and Mark went off to a small religiously-affiliated college. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone that they went to the same school, but it was a surprise that they were not roommates. David went to Cornell. As time went on, none of us kept our friendships active. Last I had heard David was working at Cornell, living in Ithaca and loving every minute of it. Mark and Tina, his childhood sweetheart, were married and living in Ohio, and they had two girls and a boy. Matt was the one I kept in contact with the most, if you could call one email a year and an obligatory Christmas card with the clichéd family picture keeping in contact. He was in Boston with a drop-dead gorgeous wife and two girls of his own.

And my college experience? I went to MIT. That’s where this story really begins.


	2. Cooper, the one who gave me freedom

Young love. Those two little words are the bane of every young girl’s existence. It is something we dream about, something we long to experience, no matter how fleeting or how painful. Most normal girls get to experience it, even if it’s just to stick their toes slightly into the warm enveloping waters, long before their high school experience has ended. We’ve already established, however, that I’m not like normal girls. When I graduated high school and went off to college, I was only 16. I hadn’t even experienced so much as my first kiss. But alas, I am getting ahead of myself once again.

My mother, for all of her nagging and negativity, did occasionally have something positive to say to me. She said even though I was an ugly baby I was getting better with age, and I actually had to agree with her. By the time I left home I outgrew some of my childhood awkwardness. I had always been scrawny, but I was starting to fill in with some curves. Good curves, curves in the right places, curves that made me want to trash my boring white cotton underwear and buy something a little nicer. My hair had grown long and acquired a bit of a natural wave to it, enabling me to simply wash and go on most days. I also had given up on makeup after the embarrassment of middle school and at most I wore lip gloss. It made my morning routine easy.

I was going to attend MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A well-known school, a school full of technological geniuses and high-tech research and scientific breakthroughs. It wasn’t my first choice; I had really wanted to attend Stanford. I didn’t want the winters, didn’t want the East Coast experience, but my mother would have none of that. While she wasn’t the warmest, or the brightest, or most emotionally available of people, she had worked herself hard to make sure I didn’t lack for educational opportunities. Since she was paying I had to concede to her wishes, and to go to the school she found most acceptable. When I received a full-tuition scholarship from MIT, plus a stipend that covered some of my room and board, the decision was made. That was the school I was going to attend.

I had a three-day mandatory orientation in June. I didn’t have a roommate for the orientation session. Every else did, so it seemed odd but I wasn’t about to complain or request one. Being the loner I am, it suited me well. During our time there I didn’t make any effort to get out and talk with anyone, I just stayed in my own little world while reading the orientation materials and going to required advisement sessions. 

One afternoon there was free time, so we were encouraged to mingle and meet other students, or to wander the campus and city. I chose to sit out in the sun on the quad. An impromptu baseball game was being played, and I watched it half-heartedly over the top of my laptop. There was a guy wearing a baseball cap with the Hyrule logo on it that kept drawing my attention. I couldn’t really place why, other than the hat. Only a silly girl like me would be more drawn to a baseball cap because of an obscure gamer logo than to the person actually wearing it.

A month later move-in day had arrived. My mother had bought me an old used SUV that guzzled gas but was a virtual tank for getting me across the country. It fit all of my worldly possessions, with room to spare for me to sleep. It took me a week to make the drive across the country, 8 to 10 hours a day of driving. I wish I could have stopped more, with so many fascinating cities along my path: Denver, Kansas City, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York. For the most part, however, I would just find a well-populated truck stop crash for the evening on the blankets I’d arranged in the back. Truckers are good, hard-working people and I found they would watch out for me if I just would acknowledge them and smile.

Once I arrived in Boston I stayed in a hotel for one night but I was too excited to sleep much. I was on campus right at 8:30 the next morning, the first one in line to pick up my keys. College represented freedom for me, a sense of independence, a chance to be on my own. To start over. To transform from an awkward frumpy shy girl into a gothic technological vixen. 

Oh, did I forget to mention my Goth phase?

About a week after my high school graduation I had a bit of an epiphany. I was about to move across the country. No one would know me, no one would know my past, no one would judge me for some awkward encounter that I’d forgotten but they remembered. It was the perfect time to re-invent myself. In the course of a day I dyed my hair black, got several piercings, purchased all new makeup, and went on a clothing shopping spree. The dark and bold colors played off my pale skin well, and my eyes suddenly felt like they had a depth of pigment and soul I’d never seen before.

Anyway, back to the dorms. After I had gotten everything up the four flights of stairs and into my room I started to get my drawers filled and my clothes hung in the closet. I heard a knock at the door and a little boy that was about nine or ten came bounding into my room. “Are you Cooper’s roommate?” he asked me excitedly.

I looked at him, completely confounded, until I realized that he thought a “co-ed by room” dorm meant boys and girls in rooms TOGETHER, rather than just boys and girls on the same floor. I’m sure I turned beet red when I told him that I was not Cooper’s roommate, but I would help him find the right place. It didn’t take long, for Cooper’s name was on the room right across the hall from my own.

To this day I blame Alex for getting his cousin and I together. Not necessarily in a bad way, because I adore Alex and miss him terribly. He just was the catalyst, the one that helped set my fate and turned me into the woman that I am today. 

Not too long after meeting Cooper and his family, my roommate Tasha arrived. She was from Georgia and had every bit the southern accent to prove it. I helped her move in her things as well, talking with her parents and learning a little more about her that couldn’t have been conveyed in an email. She was the first of her family to ever attend college so she was determined to make them proud. She was going to be studying Chemical Engineering, something her dad was constantly praising.

Once she’d gone out with her parents to the local store to get some things she’d forgotten, I delved into my boxes of electronics and other assorted goodies. Flitting around the room I hung some posters and strings of lights, then started setting up a bit of a workstation. My laptop was my constant companion, but that didn’t mean I was going to neglect any of my other circuit boards in the process.

Once done with that project, I sat back in the desk chair, contemplating what to do next. I’m not sure I can fully explain my thought process as that first evening wore on. Tasha was staying at the hotel with her parents so she could see them off in the morning, so I had the room to myself. It was quiet, and echoing, and I seem to remember thinking that all of my closest friends in high school were boys, so why shouldn’t that trend continue into college? Around nine o’clock I pulled my desk chair across the hall, sat down in it, took one look at Cooper and said “So tell me about your life”. To me, it was completely normal to want to be friends with him. To him, it was utterly dumbfounding. I learned years later when I asked him about the first night we’d met that he couldn’t believe this woman, wearing a skimpy pair of Victoria’s Secret pajamas, would be so forward and blunt. 

Odd. I’ve been called blunt many times, but never forward. I’ve since decided it’s a personality trait that comes out once every few years, and always is associated with events that will dramatically alter my life. 

As Cooper was unpacking his things that night I spied a baseball cap sitting on top of one of his boxes. I couldn’t help myself, I had to start laughing. It had a Hyrule logo, something so distinctive and obscure, that he had to be the one who had caught my attention during the game at orientation. We laughed at how we were just fated to meet. Over the course of the next few days Cooper and I hung out together constantly. A few days after moving in our entire floor did a community service project, another night we walked down to the park with some upperclassmen and played Frisbee, and right before classes started I walked with him to the closest grocery store and we loaded ourselves down with junk food. We compared schedules and found we had all classes in common save one. He was a physics major with a music minor, and I was an electrical engineering/computer science major. 

By the time I was out of high school, my lusting for freedom was almost overwhelming. That obviously affected the beginning of my college experience, and I think it’s why I fell so hard and so fast for Cooper. One week had passed since we moved into the dorms. Seven days, 168 hours was all it took for me to experience a mind-numbing number of firsts.

My first time living on my own.

My first kiss.

My first day of college classes.

My first meltdown from being homesick. That one took me by surprise.

My first time having sex.

How could I go from completely chaste to rolling between the sheets in seven short days? I still haven’t quite figured that out, even today. It just happened. It just worked. Cooper and I went from strangers to lovers, completely inseparable, within days. We never dated, we never courted, we just seemed to go from nothing to everything in the blink of an eye.

During Parents Weekend in October Cooper’s father and my mother made the trip to Boston to visit. During one of the school-sponsored events I distinctly remember his father trying to escape my mother’s mortifyingly embarrassing advances, since she was taking the opportunity to show off her newly “enhanced” boobs. He looked over to me when she’d stepped up to the bar and said “Boy, you are a quiet one, aren’t you?”. I guess I was not only quite the contrast with my own mother, but also to Cooper’s high school sweetheart. She was a stunningly gorgeous gymnast, with strawberry blonde hair, a petite frame and a bubbly personality. I was raven-haired, studious and reserved. 

Perfect, Cooper would often tell me. And that’s how my life stayed, for a very long time.

Fast forward five years. 

I was still sporting the gothic look with dyed black hair, colored streaks that changed depending on my mood, piercings, and a tattoo added in along the way. I’d thought for a long time about what ink I wanted because it had to be something that was completely me yet not large or predicable. Originally I wanted to do binary, but every word I could think of was just too long and the overall tattoo would have been too large for my liking. I finally settled on the infinity symbol, with my name worked in along the upper curve. It was on my left hip, where no one except Cooper could ever see it.

I used to joke I was the walking and talking definition of monogamous. I had never had sex with another man. I’d never made out with another man. I’d never even kissed another man, and I didn’t care. 

I finished my undergraduate degree in 3 years and was furiously working toward defending my thesis for my Master’s. Over the years I’d gotten a little less enamored with building the tech, choosing to focus instead on the virtual world. Coding, debugging, hacking, searching. Cooper graduated in 4 years, but was a mediocre student and he never could get a job with his first Bachelor's degree, despite having MIT on the diploma. While I was in class, he would sit around all day playing MMORPG’s and randomly playing with code. Usually code I’d written, but on the hactivism sites he’d take all the credit.

That should have been my first clue, a small indicator of his future behavior.

Myron lived with us while finishing his degree at Bunker Hill Community College. We were renting a small studio apartment at the time, but Cambridge was insanely expensive so we didn’t have a problem with it. Because that’s how Cooper and I were with our friends. We’d do anything for them to help them through their lives.

Myron was a computer geek, through and through. He was awkward, he would stay up for hours on end forgetting to eat, he would mainline caffeine if he could. He could actually connect with me on a level that Cooper never achieved, being able to complete strings of code without my having to say a word. The name of the school on our degrees may have been different, but our skills were formidable and almost equal. He would banter with us, eat meals with us, go to movies with us. It almost like we were part of a triad, except he didn’t participate in the sex part of our lives.

And then there was the week that changed everything. My new x-axis bi-numeric algorithm. Hacking the Department of Education. Cooper not listening to us, refusing to back off even though it put everyone in danger. Thinking we were safe, when talking a few weeks later, only to have things crash down around us as the FBI descended. Cooper taking the credit to protect me.

How did we get so far broken to get here?

Where had things gone so wrong?

Why hadn’t the earth opened up and swallowed me whole?

And then the phone call came. Cooper Sheldon was dead.


End file.
